Science

Power Plants Creating Snow and 19 Other Weird Things Captured on Radar

By Jonathan Belles

January 19 2018 03:30 PM EDT

weather.com

00:31

Radar Picks Up River Cargo Ship

A mysterious object picked up by radar on the Columbia River turns out to be a cargo ship.

At a Glance

Two power plants, one in Ohio and another in Oklahoma, produced snow flurries on Wednesday.

Power plant enhanced snow was seen on radar in Kentucky.

Many more non-meteorological features can also be spotted on radar.

The Miami Fort power station, located near the intersection of Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, was recently caught on Cincinnati airport's radar making snow.

Light winds from the northwest just above the surface, temperatures in the single digits and a very shallow layer of relatively humid air located in the lowest 1,000 feet of the atmosphere mixed with the steam from the power plant produced snow downwind Wednesday near Cincinnati.

This isn't the only feature radar can detect. Here are 19 other things we've seen in recent years.

1. A Ship on the Columbia River

Meteorologists at the National Weather Service spotted an object traveling against the weather near Portland, Oregon, on Monday.

It turns out that the object was the Maltese cargo carrier Densa Jaguar navigating down the Columbia River toward Portland. The ship reaches roughly 24 feet above the waterline and is 625 feet long, according to vesselfinder.com.

Ships like this one can be seen on radar because they are generally large objects and sometimes travel against the flow of precipitation. Ships that travel in a zigzag pattern to avoid land or stay in the deepest water can make themselves easier to spot since weather objects generally move in straight lines.

In order to be picked up on radar, ships generally have to sail close to the radar since radar beams arc upward and will miss shallow or short objects farther from the radar site. The Densa Jaguar was less than 14 miles from the radar beam, but the Weather Service explained that the beam was bent toward the ground.

Detailed radar image from the Portland radar including the Densa Jaguar encircled in white. Objects moving away from the radar are shown in red pixels while objects moving toward the radar are shown in green. In this case, the green arrow also denotes the movement of the Densa Jaguar, toward the south and southwest along the Columbia River.

(NWS Portland; Annotated by Weather.com Meteorologists)

Boats like this one are sometimes captured in high traffic ports like Seattle, Miami, Tampa Bay and the Chesapeake Bay area. Planes and interstate traffic can also be picked up by radar in certain atmospheric conditions.

2. Flying Ants

In mid-July 2017 the Met Office tweeted out the image below that showed radar detecting something in an area with no clouds over the United Kingdom. After taking a poll of answers, the Met Office revealed that the radar spotted flying ants.

This zoomed in image reveals the ski area runs right underneath where the orange and red radar pixels briefly appeared. (NOAA)

4. Interstate Traffic

Traffic moving along Interstate 37 between Corpus Christi and San Antonio was spotted on April 17, 2017, as the National Weather Service pointed out. You can see this in the narrow line of pink and light blue shadings in the animation below well northwest of Corpus Christi between the town labels for Mathis and Edroy.

In cases with a warm layer of air just above the surface, and relatively cool air near the surface, radar can detect traffic, most commonly at night. When this happens, the radar beam is ducted, or bent downward, following the curvature of the Earth, rather than its normal path shooting up higher and higher, reflecting off things such as highway traffic. Another example of this occurred on Interstate 20 near Dallas-Fort Worth during July 2016.

5. Gaggle of Geese

As the International Space Station soared southeastward across the evening sky Feb. 15, 2017 in northeastern Arkansas, the National Weather Service office in Memphis, Tennessee, spotted a large flock of geese on radar, which appeared to be chasing the ISS.

The grayish-colored reflectivity appearing in the two-hour radar loop above, spanning from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. CST on Feb. 15, indicates the gaggle of geese flying over northeastern Arkansas in hopes of catching up with the ISS. In reality, they can't physically catch it since the ISS is in space and the geese are likely flying just a few thousand feet above the Earth's surface.

A couple hours later, NWS-Memphis checked on the geese again. The determined animals had slipped below the main Memphis radar beam but were spotted by a smaller tower radar near the Mississippi River in Tunica, Mississippi.

6. Birds Inside the Eye of Hurricane Hermine

As Hurricane Hermine made landfall along Florida's Gulf coast in early September 2016, radar detected an interesting phenomenon: birds trapped flying inside the calm eye of Hermine.

Base reflectivity (left) and Differential reflectivity (right) radar images of Hermine at 10:38 p.m. EDT on Sept. 1. The red shaded area on the image to the right shows the birds swirling inside Hermine's eye just before landfall.

The birds were detected using differential reflectivity from NOAA's Dual-Polarization radar. This particular radar feature can be used to detect non-meteorological radar echoes such as birds and insects, in addition to its normal precipitation detection function.

8. The Bat Signal

Circled are the emerging colonies of bats heading out to feed on insects June 13, 2016. (NWS-San Antonio)

This image was posted by the NWS in San Antonio, Texas, on June 13, 2016 with a caption "The Bat Signal is strong tonight!"

Each circle on the map shows an emerging bat colony detected by radar as they depart for the evening to feast on insects. This is a common summertime occurrence in central Texas.

Sometimes, bats even exit their caves in waves like seen here north of San Antonio as concentric rings.

9. Swarming Termites

The above image posted by the NWS in New Orleans on the evening of May 29, 2016. In that radar image, termites can be seen swarming near the Big Easy, captured in the shades of dark blue and light green. The image was part of a radar loop that was posted to the NWS office's Twitter account.

10. Birds Along Nebraska's Platte River

This radar image from March 2, 2016, shows birds that were observed by radar along the Platte River in Nebraska. The birds are represented by the green and blue shadings near the red line, which is Interstate 80 along the Platte River in central Nebraska. Video taken the previous day verified the existence of a large number of sandhill cranes in the area, according to a Facebook post by the Rowe Sanctuary.

The NWS office in Reno, Nevada, posted to Twitter on March 27, 2015, the radar image above that shows the spring migration of Monarch butterflies. These butterflies were spotted using a differential reflectivity scan, which is typically used to identify different types of precipitation, hail size and tornadic debris. As shown in the example above, it can also identify non-meteorological echoes such as birds and insects. In this case, the NWS says the differential reflectivity shows objects that are much wider than they are taller, or what you would expect from the body type of a butterfly.

Niziol says, "On the animation above I have penciled in what I describe as 'bird front' to outline the leading edge of the bird migration as it heads from the south shores of both Lakes Erie and Ontario across the water just after sunset."

Bugs on Radar

Credit: National Weather Service Flagstaff, Ariz.

On April 30, 2013, the NWS office in Flagstaff, Arizona, grabbed this radar image detecting bugs in the green and blue shadings at the top left. The velocity image on the top right shows that the radar is able to track the direction of movement of these bugs.

Chaff on Radar

Credit: National Weather Service Jacksonville, Fla.

This image from the NWS office in Jacksonville, Florida, shows chaff in the narrow bands of green and blue radar echoes. Chaff are small pieces of aluminum which are released by military aircraft for self-defense to avoid radar detection.

Smoke on Radar

Image Credit: Gibson Ridge

On May 2, 2013, the smoke plume from the Springs fire near Camarillo, California, was picked up on radar. The smoke plume shows up in the green and blue shaded radar echoes south-southwest of Camarillo.

Turbines from the Bulter Ridge wind farm in Wisconsin mess with radar data.

(NWS Milwaukee/Sullivan)

Energy created by wind farms can mess with radar results. The Butler Ridge wind farm west of Milwaukee is one example. According to NWS Milwaukee/Sullivan, turbines stretch about 400 feet into the air, and sit within the line of sight of the NWS doppler radar in Jefferson County, Wisconsin.

"A small part of the electromagnetic energy radar beam sent from the radar is reflected back by the rotating turbines," the NWS said. "The radar processes this 'returned energy' as an area of precipitation and plots it accordingly on the map," which you can see circled in yellow.

19. Butterfly Migration Caught on Radar

Meteorologists at the National Weather Service (NWS) in Boulder, Colorado, spotted something unusual when checking Doppler radar on what was an otherwise calm weather day.

At first, the NWS meteorologists thought the radar echoes spreading from east to west across the Colorado Front Range, including the Denver metro area, were birds. Observing birds on radar is a fairly common occurrence, especially when they take flight early in the morning.

But after some additional investigation, the mystery of what the radar was sensing pointed to another culprit: migrating butterflies.

You can see the radar echoes in purple (left side) and blue (right side) advancing from right to left in the animation below (originally labeled as birds). The NWS estimated that the swath of butterflies was more than 70 miles wide, extending across all of Arapahoe County.

There was ground truth to prove that butterflies were the cause of the radar echoes based on photo reports from social media. Several tweets described seeing dozens of painted lady butterflies in yards of Denver metro residents Tuesday.

The NWS said that insects rarely produce such a well-defined radar signature as they saw on Tuesday, which led to the initial hunch that they were seeing birds.

This case was different, however, since butterflies have larger wings than a typical insect and the fact that they were highly concentrated as they flew with the wind flow at that time. Those two factors made them a big enough target for the radar to detect in a vivid manner.

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